The Scare at Rats Nightclub, Melbourne – Gig Review

For a band that started off wearing its Birthday Party influences so proudly on its sleeve – they even made the once-obligatory move to the UK a few years back! – The Scare have certainly found their “pop” wings of late. Not that I mean this in any remotely demeaning way…hey, I LIKE pop music, when it’s done well, and with their recent-ish album Oozevoodoo they managed to produce a charmingly perverse pop record with equal parts catchiness and menace. Their live show well reflects this philosophy also: crowd-pleasing and crowd-baiting in equal degrees, The Scare offer up nothing that we haven’t seen before, but damn, they do it well!

As for the size of the crowd tonight, it may not have broken any records, but it seemed like every second person in the room knew the words to every song, so apparently I’m not the only person who dug the album. And the fact that I was the only punter in the room over the age of about TWENTY seems to bode well for their long-term commercial prospects.

Here’s hoping this is just early days for the band, and even if they do claim to spend 80% of their time these days in Merry Old England, us Australians can still call ’em one of ours. Hey, we need all the cool bands we can lay claim to these days, give us a break…this ain’t the early 80s any more!!